Designed for the Rest of Us

Two hundred years ago Louise Braille was born – a man who invented a remarkable piece of technology which has enabled blind people around the world to be literate. This post is a tribute to his development of the technology of Braille.

Louise Braille was born into a family in France in 1809 and grew up 25 miles outside of Paris. His father was a Bourrelier – a harness maker. At this time, the steam engine had been around for a while, but horsepower was the predominant force in transport. So, Simon-Renee Braille had a very useful trade and his own small business, providing leather harnesses to local farmers. It was in his father’s workshop that three year old Louise damaged his right eye while trying to emulate his father’s craft with a Serpettte knife. The damage to his eye and an auto-immune reaction in his right eye (Sympathetic Ophthalmia) led to blindness at the age of five. Louise was educated at the local school and then at the age of twelve left his family and moved to Paris, where he attended the Institution Royale des Jeunes Aveugles – a school established by Valentin Hauy.

Hauy was an inspired educator who believed blind children could learn. In 1784 Hauy had observed a blind student Francois Le Sueur recognize the letter O which had been indented into a printed invitation. The letter was slightly embossed because too much pressure had been applied on the paper by the printing press. As with many inventions, Hauy’s observation was a serendipitous event which would contribute to a path of invention. Hauy developed a method of printing which produced embossed letters in paper – raised up letters that could be felt with the fingertips. There were a lot of details to work out – the metal type font had to be reversed so the raised letters were not mirror imaged, special paper developed that could be dampened and embossed without tearing, and a method found of preventing the paper from sticking to the metal type. By the time Louis attending Hauy’s school in 1821 the children were actively being taught to read this embossed paper with their fingers.

The next enhancement was a new approach to embossing developed by Charles Barbier, an ex-artillery officer. Barbier had developed a special code which could be used to make notes that could be read by touch in the dark. The code was made up of two columns of six dots. The dots corresponded to a six by six matrix of 36 syllables, vowels, and consonants needed to approximate the sounds of the French language. Using the number of dots in each column as a reference for the rows and column of the matrix, each raised dot pattern corresponded to a sound. The military were not very interested in Barbier’s ‘night writing’ system and so he advocated the potential of his invention for use by blind people. In 1821 Dr Pignier, the Director of the Institution Royale des Jeunes Aveugles, agreed to try Barbier’s system with a group of students. Louis Braille, at that time 12 years old, was one of the students.

There were problems with the system – it used a lot of space, and the dots did not fit under the fingertip, and it was not a direct parallel to regular French text. Over the next three years, inspired by the concept of the embossed dots, and already a user of Hauy’s embossed letter system, Louis developed his own technology. Louis reduced the number of dots to six and laid them out in two columns of three. He then mapped the dots to the letters of the alphabet rather than to sounds. By the time Louis was sixteen he had perfected what was to become known as ‘Braille’– the system of raised dots that is used all over the world to denote language, music, and mathematics.

The correspondence between Braille code and English alphabet.

The remarkable thing about Braille is it enables blind people to be literate. Two hundred years after the birth of Louis Braille, many people’s lives have been enriched by his technology and for that Louis Braille is deservedly internationally renowned.

Today, braille can be formed electronically and matched with a computer to produce ‘refreshable Braille’. Using devices with this technology, blind and deaf-blind people are able to access print from many sources. Accessible websites can be turned into braille so users who are unable to see can read the text on the pages. The trick is to make sure the content has been developed according to accessible design principals evangelized by the World Wide Web Consortium WC3 in their Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. As we celebrate Louise Braille’s two hundredth birthday, let us commit to following these guidelines.

This post draws on a fantastic book called ‘Louis Braille – A touch of genius’ by Michael Mellor, published by National Braille Press who makes it available in print and braille. Mellor does a great job of describing the life and times of blind people in the 1800’s and goes into the history of Braille in great detail. He publishes for the first time personal letters written by Louis, which provide a fascinating insight into his life. The National Braille Press has also developed a great website which celebrates Louise Braille’s two hundredth birthday. Happy birthday Louis!